Rahm Emanuel Suggests He Agrees Stimulus Package Wasn’t Big Enough

“They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy—produced a package that wasn’t large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. “How many bills has he passed?” […] “Now, my view is that Krugman as an economist is not wrong. But in the art of the possible, of the deal, he is wrong. He couldn’t get his legislation.”

Whether or not you think Emanuel is right about the legislative politics, it seems to significant for the White House Chief of Staff to concede that Krugman is correct about the economics and the legislation President Obama signed into law may, in virtue of its concessions to conservatives, be too small to rescue the economy.

I also always find this particular form of ping-pong to be a big odd:

Practical Politician A offers Proposal X.

Outside Commenter B says that X is too moderate on the merits.

Practical Politician A angrily retorts that better legislation on the merits would have been impossible to secure.

I think the right way to understand the (1)/(2) dynamic here is that the criticism in step (2) makes it easier to secure the passage of legislation. If you propose something, and every single progressive in all the land immediately lauds it as the greatest bill ever written, then your legislation is now an extreme left proposal and it’s doomed. If you’re going to make concessions to political reality then you need to weather a bit of criticism from your left—that’s what establishes the proposal as moderate and sensible. Things like “some liberal economists such as Paul Krugman say the proposal is too small” is a helpful piece of context-setting that prevents the proposal from appearing too radical.